Boast in Bar Ends With Hudson Swim

An Englishman who says he swam the English Channel. in 1955 and an Irish‐American aspiring actor who did his training at the Luxor Baths took cab to the Hudson River just after midnight Monday—after “a Iriendly drink” in an Eighth Avenue bar—and, leaving their clothes on shore, dived in and swam’ to New Jersey.

The cab driver's report touched off a search by police and Coast Guard helicopters, boats and patrol cars for “two possible suicides” that, counting subsequent paperwork, may have cost $15,000. The two men were charged with disorderly conduct and with violating the Public Health Law by endangering life, most immediately their own.

Both swimmers made it back to the bar, one of them before it closed at 4 A.M. and the other several hours after it reopened at 6 A.M.

Peter B. Lloyd, an Englishman with the aplomb to have put on swim trunks under his clothing, told the police that he had swum back to New York “because I assumed we were going to—we took nothing with us.”

After “fighting the current” during the 1.7 miles from the foot of 55th Street to Weehawken, he said, he swam with the current on the return, reaching shore at the Downtown Athletic Club near the Battery, for a total of 5.5 miles.

“It was too oily for the Australian crawl,’ and the gas fumes were bad, too,” said Mr. Lloyd. “But it didn't feel very sold to me. And the breaststroke is ‘better for long‐distance swimming anyway.”

By 3:15 A.M. he had hitched la ride back to the bar, said Mr. Lloyd, a tall, grayish‐blond 41‐year‐old former advertising executive who is now a cab driver, He “had two healthy drinks and a bite to ‘eat” and then went to bed in his rooming house two doors away, at m Eighth Avenue — still unaware that the helicopters he had seen over the river were looking for him. “I was only worrying that the bar would be closed,” he ‘said.

Clothing Borrowed

His swimming mate, Don O'Hara, whom he had last seen naked on a Weehawken pier, scrounged some clothes. from a Seatrain Lines watchman and bus fare to Manhattan from the Weehawken police.

Returning to the bar, which had reopened at 6 A.M., Mr. O'Hara heard on the radio that he was missing. He phoned the police.

Mr. O'Hara is a resident of the same rooming house that Mr. Lloyd lives in, having moved there from the recently closed Luxor Baths at Times Square. He checked on Mr. Lloyd and found him asleep. Mr. Lloyd’ slept, he said, “until people’ started banging on my door.”

The 37‐year‐old Mr. O'Hara, la “part‐time temporary” cab driver from Scranton, Pa., with a ruddy face and a battered chin, bridled a bit at the “streaking jokes perpetrated by the police at the Midtown North Precinct, 306 West 54th Street.

“All this talk about stark naked in the streets of Jersey,” he said indignantly. “It was a deserted pier, and I happened to be nude.”

It all started at Ferguson & McLoughlin's Bar and Grill, 932 Eighth Avenue, near ,55th Street, where the two men were drinking with a fellow cab driver and habitue, a Bostonian named Tom Dooley.

“Did you ever read ‘The Iceman Cometh’ by Eugene O'Neill?” Peter McLoughlin, son of the owner, remarked later in. the day. “We don't have jukebox or sawdust on the floor, but it's a workingman's bar. And some of them are on hard times a bit.”

He said he knew Mr. O'Hara “more recently” than Mr. Lloyd, whom he called “a good man, hard‐working and a bit shy.”

“I knew he swam a bit,” he said, laughing over the incident, but I didn't know he had such high ambitiohs.”

Mr. Lloyd, a Canadian citizen. had remained at L. W. Frolich‐Intercon as an account executive for only a few months after coming’ from the company's Canadian branch in 1969, said a spokesman for the advertising agency at 509 Madison Avenue. Mr. Lloyd himself said that since he began driving a cab, he had been writing a novel.

Mr. O'Hara said that he was “still confident about making, it in the theater, but that his only role in ‘New York had been as “an idiot Irish coal miner” in “Nobody Hears Broken Drum,” the play about the Molly McGuires by Jasr.n Miller, who is also from Scranton. Playbills show that Mr. O'Hara appeared in its six‐performance run at the Fortune Theater, on the Lower East Side, in March, 1970.

Both men insisted that “we had just had a few beers.. when the conversation turned to swimming.”Said

They agreed that Mr. Lloyd had not talked about his claim of having swum the Channel. Mr. Lloyd, a native of Devon, said later that he had never swum “competitively” but had swum from England to France “with two friends and with a boat alongside while he was a student at the University of London.

In seven years he earned “a Bachelor of Science in zoology. with a specialty in etiology, and a master's in business administration.”

“I hope my mother doesn't; hear about this and find out I'm driving a taxi,” he said, displaying the first rumple in his poise.

British sources were unable to confirm Mr. Lloyd'i channel swim, but noted that “except for people who break records or are well known otherwise, many swims are made that go unrecorded.”

After Mr. Lloyd ran next door for his swim trunks, the three men took a cab to Pier 94. No known witness saw them in the water after Mr. Dooley and the cab driver lost sight of ‘them, but police officers heard their voices.

“One of them yelled ‘Take easy!’ andthat gave the feel ing they might be in trouble,” one officer said.

“We were in no trouble at any time,” scoffed Mr. O'Hara. “We were swimming ‘buddy system,’ and when Peter started back without. climbing the pier, I wasn't going to swim back alone, even though didn't know whether I was in Newark, Jersey City or Omaha. It was a stupid thing to do—the water is dirty and full of debris, —but we were never in danger.”

Detective John Wales of Midtown North said that the search and the booking pro‐, cedures for the two men be‐1 fore they were released had involved the “operations time and manpower” of a Coast Guard launch with a crew of sight, two police launches with four‐man crews, an unspecified number of radio cars with officers “looking along the highNay,” three detectives and a sergeant, as well as two men it the Missing Persons Bureau.

Detective Wales said that :lerical personnel at the pre:inct had estimated the total ;ost as “possibly $15,000.”